Many displaced renters remain on their own, awaiting Katrina aid

Jennifer Zdon / The Times-PicayuneKeiajuana Tate, 30, lives between two homes owned by aunts as she gets her GED and works for the Superdome. Tate is hoping she will be issued a rental-assistance voucher so she can finally have a home of her own.

Most days, Keiajuana Tate works at the Superdome, attends a two-hour GED class, then heads to an aunt's house to sleep on a sofa.

Tate collects an average of $900 a month between her job and a disability check, she said, putting rent and utilities out of reach even if she lands the full-time job she now seeks. When she looked at apartments renting for $500 or less, she found inoperable plumbing, holes in the floors and dangerous wiring.

"Horrible, " she said.

Jennifer Zdon / The Times-PicayuneLocked-up Curran Place in eastern New Orleans has not been repaired since Hurricane Katrina.

Before Hurricane Katrina, Tate, now 30, rented in Curran Place, a privately owned complex in eastern New Orleans subsidized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Like residents of public housing, Tate paid standard HUD-subsidized rent: up to one-third of her monthly income. Though she would qualify for the Section 8 rental-assistance program, the Section 8 list kept by the Housing Authority of New Orleans has not accepted new applications for years.

After the flood, the apartment complex opted out of the HUD program, making Tate theoretically eligible for a Section 8 voucher that she could use to find another place. But more than three years after Katrina, she has yet to receive the voucher, and it may be several more months before help arrives.

Slow progress

Critics say HUD's inaction on two fronts has hurt Tate and other low-income renters. The agency has been slow to award vouchers to pre-Katrina renters who lived in the city's HUD-subsidized apartments, they say. And low-income renters in New Orleans have far less affordable housing to choose from, because the agency and its private partners have made few repairs since the storm, leaving nearly 4,000 HUD-subsidized apartments vacant.

HUD spokesman Jerry Brown said the process is "complex" and involves many parties.

"HUD is working with private landlords who are, in turn, working with insurers and investors to rebuild, " he said.

But U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, who for three years has pushed HUD to rebuild its subsidized housing, stated via e-mail that she is troubled both by HUD's "countless" uninhabitable properties and by "the residents of those properties (who) have not yet received the rental assistance they desperately need."

In a recent report to Landrieu, HUD noted that the owners of six New Orleans properties -- Curran Place, Frenchman's Wharf I and II, Haydel Heights, Dauphine Apartments and Josephine Apartments -- had opted out of a HUD low-income rental program, making 395 former tenants eligible for rental aid.

These were not recent events. Curran Place owners opted out of the program about two years ago, agent Don Peterson said. The owners of Haydel Heights and Josephine Apartments bowed out in January, property agent Bert Loe said.

Brown said HUD could not immediately offer an explanation for the delays, because its staff is dealing with damage from Hurricanes Gustav and Ike and could respond to only a limited number of questions.

Too little, too late

HUD will send authorization letters to the 395 households in 30 to 45 days, Brown said.

But HUD's own experience shows that, three years after Katrina, many tenants' addresses may be stale: The agency got a paltry response to a July letter sent to 1,600 former tenants from six other properties in Kenner, Westwego and New Orleans.

Only 25 percent responded by September, prompting HUD to issue a press release stating it was still trying to locate 1,200 Katrina evacuee households. HUD asked residents of those households to call a phone number by Friday. By the end of last month, about 40 percent of the households had responded, Brown said.

No one who responded has received rental assistance yet, Brown said. HUD will not begin distributing those vouchers until after the Friday deadline, he said, and because of Gustav and Ike, HUD could not estimate how long that will take.

HUD hopes to improve the response this time by cross-referencing addresses with data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he said.

That may help, but a good share of tenants will not be in FEMA's system, predicted New Orleans Legal Assistance lawyer Laura Tuggle. One-third of her HUD-subsidized clients are, like Tate, living without housing assistance, she said. Since the tenants dealt only with private landlords, they did not instinctively know to contact HUD, which subsidized their rent through monthly payments to property owners, she said. By the time they visited legal aid offices, it was too late to apply for aid, she said.

Making do

But even the HUD tenants who receive disaster aid will lose it soon, since the main Katrina rental-assistance program expires in February, Tuggle said.

So, for now, Tate said she will continue to shuttle between two aunts and their sofas.

She hopes her voucher arrives before she overstays her welcome. After all, she said, space is tight: One aunt has two daughters and two granddaughters; the other has five grandchildren.

So earlier this month, Tate phoned HUD's tenant line and told them where she had lived before the storm, hoping that she could hasten the vouchering process.

But the woman who took the call would not even take her name. "She couldn't tell me anything except that they weren't ready to deal with Curran Place yet, " Tate said.

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Katy Reckdahl can be reached at kreckdahl@timespicayune.com or 504.826.396.